Tuesday, October 4, 2011

To make it look realistic, the school obtained sirens and flashing lights from the police and littered the grounds with debris from the 'spaceship'.

Parents yesterday condemned the school for 'terrifying' their children and claimed that teachers had gone over the top in trying to 'fire their imagination'.

The 'Everyone Writes Day' - for all 370 pupils at the school in Burgess Hill, West Sussex - was designed to develop youngsters' writing skills.

It is based on an idea from the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the National Literacy Trust. The aim is to find ways to take writing beyond the classroom and to provide 'exciting stimuli' for storytelling.

At the start of the day, head Diana Goss informed pupils that an alien craft had crashed near the school and pupils were encouraged to 'follow a trail of debris' before stumbling across the UFO.

Sussex Police set up a crime scene around the crashed craft and supplied a police constable and a community support officer for two hours to help the children produce witness statements.

Pupils were told that Joy Law, the school's learning support teacher, who is responsible for special needs pupils, had been abducted.

LOL! This is awesome! That would have scared the bejezus out of me, but it would have been so much fun! I would love the read the stories that the children wrote after this experience :) I bet they're funny ;)

When I was in high school, an English teacher did this to a few of his students. They went out in the woods under some guise with a tape recorder (hey - it was the 80's). He had set up a crash site with lights and smoke but things went wild when the "alien" showed up.

The one with the tape tried to document the event while he fled and you could hear everyone else screaming and running.

Everyone had a good laugh over it and no teachers were fired. It even made the paper.

Those lucky kids are going to remember that FOREVER! That's so awesome. Sounds like some parents just couldn't deal with having their little ones crawl into bed with them for a few nights (which is something I'm getting used to around this time of year - hahaha).

I agree that it's a cool idea, but the kids with special learning needs, such as autism, were terrified that their teacher had been taken. She was their teacher and had a close relationship with them and they weren't of the capacity to know that this was all a big production. I have an autistic nephew, and messing with him at that age in such a way would just be cruel. BTW, the "pussification of America" took place in the UK.